Firefox 3 - Download Day is here!

Set a Guinness World Record
Enjoy a Better Web

Today, Mozilla is officially launching the third version of its popular web browser.
It's also trying to set a Guinness World Record through achieving the maximum number of downloads within 24 hours. By the way, this is a great marketing approach. Congratulations for the Mozilla Marketing Team, you have probably achieved success - at least on spreading Firefox 3.0 - since by the time I'm writing this post I can see 4,386,415 as the total number of downloads.

I did download and install it on my machine, and started looking for the improvements (which by Mozilla's information are a lot - "With more than 15,000 improvements, Firefox 3 is faster, safer and smarter than ever before.")

My Quick Tour:
1) First thing of all, I looked for my favorites Add-Ons (I would like to make sure all of them were there, available for this new version of Firefox)
They are: Delicious Bookmarks, FlashGot, Web Developer, Firebug, Cooliris, GSpace, Mouse Gestures.
Conclusion: Excepting Mouse Gestures all extensions are available for Firefox 3.0. That's a good Thing! :D

2) I tested what Mozilla calls the top new features:
Password Manager: Remember site passwords without ever seeing a pop-up.

One-Click Bookmarking: Bookmark, search and organize Web sites quickly and easily.
Improved Performance : View Web pages faster, using less of your computer’s memory.
Smart Location Bar: Find the sites you love in seconds—enter a term for instant matches that make sense.

Instant Web Site ID: Avoid online scams, unsafe transactions and forgeries with simple site identity.

Full Zoom: See any part of a Web page, up close and readable, in seconds.

Platform-Native Look & Feel:Browse with a Firefox that’s integrated into your computer’s operating system.

Although 'Smart Location Bar' is a really nice feature, I want to expose my dissatisfaction with the privacy police of it. My concern is that while somebody types an address on the location bar it suggests links of emails that are in my email inbox, exposing the title and sender of them, even if my email account is logged out (I was using gmail). I'm not confortable at all with that. This way, anybody using my computer would see all the titles (and sender) of most of my emails.

I don't want to spend time telling the obvious benefits of each new feature, but wanted to say that overall I'm very satisfied with all of them, specially with 'improved performance', 'one-click bookmark' and 'full zoom'.
Actually Full Zoom ROCKS! I do usually use a big monitor (29") and zoom is really important to me. It was a huge improvement from the previous supported zoom, which actually increases only text size.
Further on this list, the less significant improvement - to me - was the 'Plataform-Native Look & Feel'.

3) I tested some other features:
Most of them are pretty nice and o.k., but I'd most liked one that will probably change the way I interact with my browser: it's called Tags.
Now, you can easily tag sites on your bookmarks and then access them by typing the tag name on the location bar - which will suggest the sites tagged with that name.
For example, if I tag www.nytimes.com and www.lemonde.com with the tag news, then, when I 'd type the word news on the location bar, both sites (and all other site tagged with that name) are going to friendly appear to me to be chosen.

Well...unfortunately I didn't tried the beta versions to compare and neither evaluate deterministically the performance of the new browser (I wasn't intending to do that in this post) and neither made a deep review, but I hope it can help somebody to be introduced to this new good product.

For more information, follow the link:
List and description of the new features.